Hand-held, motor-driven epilators have become increasingly popular in recent years. Such epilators generally comprise pairs of cooperating clamping discs or other mechanisms for extracting hairs from skin.
Epilation can be quite a painful procedure. However, it has been found that the pain can be significantly reduced by stimulating nerves in the skin immediately before hairs are extracted from the skin. Today a multiplicity of epilators having a massage, vibration or other pain-reducing device are available. Such devices can be passive, or they can be actively driven by a motor, e.g. by the motor which also drives the clamping discs. Experiments have shown that the amount of pain reduction that is achieved by massaging or vibrating members varies from one user to another and is also quite dependent on the specific nature of the massaging and/or vibrational stimuli.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,520,970 B1 and U.S. Pat. No. 6,740,097 B1, respectively, describe sets of rotatable gear wheels and spiked cylinders which are rotatably arranged next to the clamping discs, for stimulating nerves in the skin prior to the removal of hair.
It is an object of the invention to provide an epilator having a pain-reducing element for providing particular stimuli to the skin.